player profiles

Bored Invents

Perusing match reports at the end of the first day’s play in Nagpur,
it appeared that this tune was suddenly en vogue again. What a
coincidence I thought, since my mind had been mulling over a modified
version of it. Modified, you know, to reflect the fact that the hapless
souls clinging on by their fingernails whilst dangling over the edge of
the precipice weren’t the English. Yes, the temptation to sing it aloud
having swapped out the identities of the two countries playing out the
Test match was strong. But I kept balking at the bit.

It was that word desperation. That didn’t fit.

So I just read on, finding myself in an utterly unfamiliar and
unsettling position – of having missed the events of an entire day’s
play of a Test match. Willingly. I had looked askance without a
conscious or preplanned ambivalence. The telecast had been a click of
the remote away, but I never did indulge. Why this Test match, the
entirety of the tour had been a perplexing period. And I had struggled
with it. Struggled to come to grips with my detachment from it. I could
not recollect the last time this had happened. Yes, Pujara. And Cook.
Even Joe took root. But it all remained so distant. It certainly wasn’t
apathy, but my ambivalence was continually nagging at me.

“This could be a momentousTest match” intoned the first
sentence of the match preview on Cricinfo. Momentous! The first word
that came to my mind when I saw that was: bollocks. Bollocks, for there
were no moments of significance to be had here. All the moments had
passed. In fact, they littered the sides of the highway to oblivion the
Indian team had ridden to reach Nagpur. The moments were still
fluttering to earth from the long and agonizing free-fall the number one
team had embarked on. Starting with that running cannonball jump off
the balcony of Lords eighteen months ago.

Yes, eighteen months and counting now. Eighteen months of watching it
all unravel. Starting with England, where it went belly-up and rigor
mortis appeared to have set in at Edgbaston; rendering the rotund R.P
Singh’s mad dash from Miami to The Oval a perverse comedic exercise. And
then Australia. And it wasn’t long before that tour took on all the
gravitas of an extended experiment in proving that it does indeed swirl clockwise in the southern hemisphere too. They weren’t packing as much as a Swiss-army knife in that gunfight.

So it has been. For eighteen long months. That which elicited
brow-knotted surprise at Lord’s was followed by bewilderment, shock,
anger, frustration, morbid fascination and then the inevitable
resignation. Endless days spent gritting teeth and silently goading them
on to at least plant their feet and take a few swings. Bare their
teeth. Futile exhortations that yielded diddly-squat. Rarely providing a
semblance of a sustained contest. There were the results, yes. But the
results didn’t come close to trumping the vibe emanating from them. Or
how painful watching them had been. The spinelessness, listlessness and
jadedness had now proven so contagious that I was just willing the
current tour on to a rapid denouement.

Was it Kolkata that shut the door behind emphatically? Was that
depressing Test match the moment when it all came full circle? Or full
clockwise swirl? When the free-fall was arrested with a resounding thud?
Was it really the straw that broke the back?

I did give that thought some credence now in Nagpur – albeit briefly.
Only briefly, for it just wouldn’t stick. Didn’t add up and tie it all
up conveniently. Kolkata was no straw that broke no back. This straw had
been chewed up and spat out ceremoniously a while ago. The more I think
about it, it was Perth that precipitated my current state. It had
crossed a line at the WACA and then in Adelaide, it well and truly
jumped the shark.

Seven in a row it was back in Perth. Seven back to back train wrecks
that had each careened one way and then another before the pileup of
twisted metal. The mind had been numbed by the relentless debacles that
out-jostled each other into our living rooms. The wells of
disappointment and bewilderment at the team at the pinnacle plumbing the
depths had evaporated dry. Adelaide had been rendered completely
irrelevant by then.

The only hope remaining was that some introspection, an iota of it,
would surface to begin the process of healing. Of beginning to think
about starting to commence the process of turning this iceberg around.
Even alcoholics have moments of clarity when they fleetingly contemplate
and acknowledge the root cause of their condition. Moments that can
possibly lead them through the fog towards the light. Alcoholics
Anonymous sessions perhaps.

Instead, in Perth, we stumbled upon an Alcoholics Unanimous meeting.
Right after train wreck No. 7. And the foul taste from it has lingered
and festered ever since. And enveloped the entirety of this tour in
multifarious ways. For that was the day we heard the words “Once these
people come to India…” I, for one will always look back to that day as
the pits of this eighteen month long fiasco.

We had almost given up on asking for a fight by then. Or yearning for
a contest. There was certainly no entertaining of turnaround thoughts.
We weren’t seeking any acts of contrition either. Or soul baring honesty
in utterances. All we could hope to see was a sign. Any sign. On or off
the field. A sign that acknowledged the team’s own state and abject
performances and fronted up. A sign goes a long way, you know. Instead
came the appalling and offensive posturing. The bizarre and shameful
defense. Felt like we were now being slapped in the face with a limp
noodle.

This dam was always going to be breached at some point and so it was
with these words offered in the face of the annihilation “Once these
people come to India we should not be hesitant in making turners, and
that’s where we would get to know whether they are mentally strong”. Oh,
just a knee-jerk act of frustration not to be taken seriously, correct?
An act of petulance at a vulnerable moment that brooked nothing more
than a snicker? Kohli’s finger in Sydney was an act of petulance. This
ran far deeper. This was when it really stung.

Back home, the big chief, the grand poobah, the big-fat-noodle
himself offered this in comfort and solace as he hitched up his
suspenders in the face of that defeat: “Next New Zealand is coming to
India and it will be followed by England and Australia. We will beat
these three teams on our own soil. They cannot beat us here and we will
feel very happy.” Between the players’ reactions (or lack of) and their
custodians’ platitudinous bags of wind lay bare a malaise afflicting
Indian cricket. The results should never have been a surprise.

Yes, come to India. Come home to papa. With that the tone for this
series against England was set. My tone at least. Match after match in
the 8-0 pasting, I had watched incredulously as reactions at post-match
interviews and press conferences at the venues and back home took on
surreal tones. India just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time – playing away from home – it appeared. Just an anomaly. One that
would be rectified soon.

And as this series dawned, the chickens from Perth well and truly
came home to roost. There cannot have been a cricket series in memory
(mine at least) where the topic of home-field advantage and playing
conditions reached such cacophonous levels. Even before a ball was
bowled in a Test and as England were playing out their practice matches,
commenced the relentless swirl of player and media thrashings that soon
became unbearable.

Opening any newspaper every morning revealed yet another buffet,
another twenty two yards of horse manure laid out for our consumption.
Unmanned drones were dispatched to upcoming venues. We even saw pictures
of curators. One miffed curator called all of it “immoral”. The board
retaliated by flying in a replacement. Was Dhoni upset with the
curators? Or was it the other way round? Always smelling a morsel, leave
alone a drop of blood, the sharks from the media thrashed around till
it frothed. It did go to eleven and was deafening and relentless.

And I was still looking for just a sign. In the midst of the bedlam.
That was all one could ask for given that all was lost. And here, the
team abjectly disappointed. Their performances in Mumbai and Kolkata
were caricatures of their performances in England and Australia. The
trauma of their lame and disgusting threat (“We’ll show them at home)
that was now skewered like a kebab appeared to have sunk them into a
deeper funk. They looked like they had ODed on quaaludes at Eden
Gardens. This lot honestly looked like they couldn’t wait to get it over
with.

How did it come to this? Why has the spine and heart to swing their
way out of a corner become so alien to this once impressive bunch of
cricketers? Why is there such a collective loss of leadership and
backbone in this lot? Why do they lose even the veneer of a team and not
a rag-tag collection of misfits the moment adversity nudges them in the
ribs? And why has Indian cricket descended into such a morass the
instant they reached the summit?

In the end, it was still just a sign we sought. A bit of grace, a bit
of class in defeat, a little less evasion and obfuscation and a dose of
introspection would have made a difference. At any point. Would have
erased that surreal halo of entitlement which they wore around right
through these eighteen months. Sure, the losses would have still stung.
The mix of the squad would still need to be addressed. And yes,
retirements would still need to be discussed. But just an honest and
open inward gaze, that’s all. A blunt look at performance and technique
and effort, curator be damned. Catharsis has a funny way of working.
Things might even have turned out a bit different.

Today, at the end of it all Dhoni offered: “But there are not many
things that will come close to when we lost the 2007 50-over World Cup.
This is not even close to that.”

Just telling us how much this one hurt would have sufficed.

This is no ordinary fall. That word desperation never did fit all along.